It would appear that the camera input on the board goes directly into the Broadcom chip, but I haven't found any info on what happens to it from there. My interest it to be able to use the camera input as a generic high speed input, not necessarily for a camera like device. But it is not at all clear what sort of software mods would be needed for that.
Is this at all feasible with this board?
-- Rick
It goes into the GPU, which does all the necessary image processing to make the camera image usable.
Since end-users don't have access to the GPU (see previous thread) I think it's unlikely.
Theo
Are you sure that access to the GPU is required?
First, do you know for a fact that the camera input goes directly to the GPU and is not accessible by the CPU?
Second, what functions are already available through the GPU that could be used? If the only function of the camera is to display the image through the GPU, that would be a very unhelpful input. Surely the GPU has a driver to allow the video to be sent to a file or piped or some other capability.
-- Rick
Not for definite, because the GPU-side memory map isn't documented and there may be an address it can be poked somewhere that isn't mentioned. However, there's quite a lot of postprocessing to be done:
I assume, but I haven't tried for sure, that it allows OpenMAX AL to get at the camera functionality:
However it's the GPU driver that's on the other end of that API.
The user-facing programs have most of the same functionality and use the simpler mmal API:
Theo
Thanks for the links. They talk about being able to store the raw "Bayer" data in the JPG meta data. There is even a thread from someone else wanting to use the camera interface as a general purpose interface.
-- Rick
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